With Social Connections
just around the corner and the Collabsphere
agenda recently announced, it's the time of year when we issue
our call for directors.

There are four
Member Director posts up for election this year. Any employee of a Member company
is eligible to apply and the posts run for a two-year term. The following
Member Directors terms are currently expiring:

Yesterday Richard
Moy announced a new contest
to provide a modern user experience for DMA to a traditional Notes template.

After contest
in recent years for Connections Customizer and XPages, now is the right
time to engage with LotusScript and Formula Language developers and re-energise
that community around open source.

There are many
developers who never made the jump to XPages and may not make the leap
to the App Dev Pack. But IBM and HCL's launch of DMA has brought an additional
entry point to Notes Client applications. HCL's work on iPhone and Android
(tablet and phone) DMA apps with expand that reach across the two main
mobile platforms. And with V11 the lightweight client is likely to bring
Notes Client applications to any modern browser. Applications built with
traditional design elements, LotusScript and Formula Language can have
a greater reach than ever before. And OpenNTF is still here ready to embrace
those open source samples to wow users and educate developers.

But most client
applications on OpenNTF have not had a facelift in a decade. And the facelift
given to the core templates is not one that works outside the Eclipse client.
The world has moved on, expectations have changed, and it's time for applications
to modernise as well. Technology is not a barrier to user experience. Just
because it's Notes doesn't mean it can't be fresh, as Theo Heselmans showed
with his Wine Tasting App.
Paul Withers also delivered a session at Engage earlier this year on modernising applications
including adding a DMA interface to the XPages Extension Library database.
There is a blog post going
into more detail.

So while you're
waiting for the template to be selected and the start of the contest, take
a look at these and think about innovative approaches.

Once the contest
starts, there will be people available to act as mentors for teams. And
the template itself will be packaged with the relevant license and notice
files, plus starter markdown documentation file, ready for final deployment
to OpenNTF. If teams want a GitHub repository setting up under OpenNTF
for source control, we can do so. We also advise on issues templates / feature request templates
/ CLA process integration on GitHub.

Nearly half of the
OpenNTF board members were present at Engage - Paul Withers, Oliver Busse,
Jesse Gallagher, Graham Acres and Serdar Basegmez. Hopefully everone had
a good time at the showcase reception on Tuesday evening we co-sponsored
with HADSL. We had a round table on Tuesday morning that was very well
attended, with a lively discussion. In the build-up we posted seven poll
questions on Twitter. Thanks to all who got involved, though because of
technical challenges the questions were only posted during the opening
session of Engage.

The results reinforced
the theme of the round table, that the developer tools that will be used
for development against Domino in the next decade will be different to
those for the last decade. First off, we stated Domino Designer - enhancement
or replacement - was out of scope of the round table. In terms of the rise
of exposure to other development tools, this is already happening with
sessions at Engage on Docker and more. But many have yet to be familiar
with tools and techniques that are standard outside of the yellowverse.
This was reinforced with responses around Maven, Gradle and npm. Although
many had some experience (particularly of npm), few considered themselves
familiar enough. This isn't surprising considering many confirmed they
came from a citizen developer background. There are a lot of educational
resources available, but they are not specifically targeted at our community
and don't provide a simple single end-to-end tutorial taking you from zero
to hero. But there was a strong experience of Java amongst the audience,
as well as for XPages - not a surprise. There will be a lot of interest
in the future Java domino-db module - hopefully integrating with proton
and hopefully available centrally, like other Java SDKs, on places like
Maven Central. In terms of proton and gRPC itself, there seemed not great
understanding of performance metrics vs HTTP. Maybe this explains why so
few have tried the app dev pack and may prefer to stay with more familiar
options for REST services like XPages.

In terms of XPages
itself, the final question to our audience confirmed that many would feel
open sourcing XPages would be something they would welcome, and more than
expected said that they would be interested in getting involved, although
technical knowledge is of course a key requirement. What the future or
best outcome on XPages will be, it's too early to know. PrimeFaces has
been raised by some as a preferable framework, though not widely.

Regardless of
XPages, Java or Node.js, Notes Client development has had a resurgence.
And that option - probably the clearest RADD option - now supports mobile
and, potentially in the future, web through the lightweight client. Sametime
has a renewed focus as well, and it's worth reiterating that OpenNTF has
always supported projects for Sametime as well. Once the deal closes, Connections
is also expected to receive increased focus and we support projects for
that too. It's best to finish our review of the round table with a tweet
from Graham Acres, "We encourage members of the #dominoforever community
to join and contribute. It doesn’t have to be your own idea. Join an existing
project. Write documentation. There are lots of opportunities to help each
other. @openntf at #engageug"

Before we finish,
we would like to wish a speedy recovery to our chairman Christian Guedemann.